Friday, August 03, 2012

"Stairway To Heaven" Stretched To 77 Minutes

Buttress O'Kneel is the Australian madwomen who won our "M4M Idol" contest last year, and "Avant Retro: Post​-​Tardcore," her latest mashup/sound collage on-line album, continues her winning streak. She rarely just drops an acapella from one song over someone else's instrumental, and when she does, as in the 48 second Guns 'n' Roses vs Jane's Addiction "Been Caught", it's all-too-short. Many tracks seems to have at least 4 sources fighting to be heard. Other strategies include: creating amusing dialogues between the songs (dig Grandmaster Flash's back-and-forth with the B52s on "Jungle Rat"), pounding the likes of The Buggles and Rick James into breakcore submission, and glitching up a song into abstraction a la John Oswald's Plunderphonics ("Mother Nature's Mulch"). And what's not to love about a song with a title like "She Blinded Me With Shatner"? Pick hit: "Running For Party Leader." (And bonus points for elsewhere sampling nutty Rhino Records parodists Big Daddy.)

All of which makes her other new recordings so surprising: they are as chilled and meditative ("spiritualy-themed," she sez) as her usual stuff is violent and confrontational. She has recently uploaded a series of extremely-slowed down remixes (for lack of a better word) to archive.org. Stevie Wonder's "Superstition," the theme song to 'The Neverending Story' (at a never-ending 102 minutes long), and Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody', among others, have been streeeeeeetched to great lengths. The results are not the monotonous drone-fests you'd expect, but beatiful ambient music. My fave of the bunch is "Heaven," which elongates Zep's "Stairway To Heaven" to 77 minutes and 7 seconds. When Robert Plant's vocals show up at around the 9 minute mark, they are surprisingly legible - you can make out some of the lyrics. This track was even apparently actually played at a church service, but the sometimes spooky results are as ghostly as they are Gregorian. Free listen/download here: